Quotes about Writing

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.

But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people ... and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady

We all ought to make sacrifices for literature.

The very beginning was written and all he had to do was go on. That's all, he said. You see how simple what you cannot do is?

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

I've always loved the editing process.

I did some writing and bought a book, and have been working on that as a film to act and direct in.

Art can't be taught; passion can't be taught; discipline can't be taught; but craft can be taught. And writing is both an art and a craft.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose-unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.